There is Captain Kearney, the magnificent liar; and Captain Horton, who lay in bed all day long; and Mr. Chucks, and Mrs. Trotter who cadges eleven pairs of cotton stockings—they are all drawn vigorously, decisively, from the living face, just as the Captain’s pen, we are told, used to dash off” caricatures upon a sheet of notepaper.
With all these qualities, then, what was there stunted in his equipment? Why does the attention slip and the eye merely register printed words? One reason, of course, is that there are no heights in this level world. Violent and agitated as it is, as full of fights and escapes as Captain Marryat’s private log, yet there comes a sense of monotony; the same emotion is repeated; we never feel that we are approaching anything; the end is never a consummation. Again, emphatic and trenchant as his characters are, not one of them rounds and fills to his full size, because some of the elements that go to make character are lacking. A chance sentence suggests why this should be so. “After this we had a conversation of two hours; but what lovers say is very silly, except to themselves, and the reader need not be troubled with it.” The intenser emotions of the human race are kept out. Love is banished; and when love is banished, other valuable emotions that are allied to her are apt to go too. Humour has to have a dash of passion in it; death has to have something that makes us ponder. But here there is a kind of bright hardness. Though he has a curious love of what is physically disgusting—the face of a child nibbled by fish, a woman’s body bloated with gin—he is sexually not so much chaste as prudish, and his morality has the glib slickness of a schoolmaster preaching down to small boys. In short, after a fine burst of pleasure there comes a time when the spell that Captain Marryat lays upon us wears thin, and we see through the veil of fiction facts—facts, it is true, that are interesting in themselves; facts about yawls and jolly boats and how boats going into action are “fitted to pull with grummets upon iron thole pins”; but their interest is another kind of interest, and as much out of harmony with imagination as a bedroom cupboard is with the dream of someone waking from sleep.
Often in a shallow book, when we wake, we wake to nothing at all; but here when we wake, we wake to the presence of a personage—a retired naval officer with an active mind and a caustic tongue, who as he trundles his wife and family across the Continent in the year 1835 is forced to give expression to his opinions in a diary. Sick though he was of story-writing and bored by a literary life—“If I were not rather in want of money,” he tells his mother, “I certainly would not write any more”—he must express his mind somehow; and his mind was a courageous mind, an unconventional mind. The Press-gang, he thought an abomination. Why, he asked, do English philanthropists bother about slaves in Africa when English children are working seventeen hours a day in factories? The Game Laws are, in his opinion, a source of much misery to the poor; the law of primogeniture should be altered, and there is something to be said for the Roman Catholic religion. Every kind of topic—politics, science, religion, history—comes into view, but only for a fleeting glance. Whether the diary form was to blame or the jolting of a stage coach, or whether lack of book learning and a youth spent in cutting out brigs is a bad training for the reflective powers, the Captain’s mind, as he remarked when he stopped for two hours and had a look at it, “is like a kaleidoscope.” But no, he added with just self-analysis, it was not like a kaleidoscope; “for the patterns of kaleidoscopes are regular, and there is very little regularity in my brain, at all events.” He hops from thing to thing. Now he rattles off the history of Liège; next moment he discourses upon reason and instinct; then he considers what degree of pain is inflicted upon fish by taking them with the hook; and then, taking a walk through the streets, it strikes him how very seldom you now meet with a name beginning with X. “Rest!” he exclaims with reason; “no, the wheels of a carriage may rest, even the body for a time may rest, but the mind will not.” And so, in an excess of restlessness, he is off to America.
Nor do we catch sight of him again—for the six volumes in which he recorded his opinion of America, though they got him into trouble with the inhabitants, now throw light upon nothing in particular—until his daughter, having shut up her Dictionaries and Gazettes, bethinks her of a few “vague remembrances”. They are only trifles, she admits, and put together in a very random way, but still she remembers him very vividly. He was five foot ten and weighed fourteen stone, she remembers; he had a deep dimple in his chin, and one of his eyebrows was higher than the other, so that he always wore a look of inquiry. Indeed, he was a very restless man. He would break into his brother’s room and wake him in the middle of the night to suggest that they should start at once to Austria and buy a château in Hungary and make their fortunes. But, alas! he never did make his fortune, she recalls. What with his building at Langham, and the great decoy which he had made on his best grazing land, and other extravagances not easy for a daughter to specify, he left little wealth behind him. He had to keep hard at his writing. He wrote his books sitting at a table in the dining-room, from which he could see the lawn and his favourite bull Ben Brace grazing there. And he wrote so small a hand that the copyist had to stick a pin in to mark the place. Also he was wonderfully neat in his dress, and would have nothing but white china on his breakfast table, and kept sixteen clocks and liked to hear them all strike at once. His children called him “Baby”, though he was a man of violent passions, dangerous to thwart, and often “very grave” at home.
“These trifles put on paper look sadly insignificant,” she concludes. Yet as she rambles on they do in their butterfly way bring back the summer morning and the dying Captain after all his voyages stretched on the mattress in the boudoir room dictating those last words to his daughter about love and roses. “The more fancifully they were tied together, the better he liked it,” she says. Indeed, after his death a bunch of pinks and roses was “found pressed between his body and the mattress”.
[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 26, 1935]
Ruskin.
What did our fathers of the nineteenth century do to deserve so much scolding? That is a question which we find ourselves asking sometimes as we dip here and there into the long row of volumes which bear the names of Garlyle and Ruskin. And if we also dip into the lives of those great men we shall find evidence that our fathers were a good deal responsible for the tone which their teachers adopted towards them. There can be no doubt that they liked their great men to be isolated from the rest of the world. Genius was nearly as antisocial and demanded almost as drastic a separation from the ordinary works and duties of mankind as insanity. Accordingly, the great man of that age had much temptation to withdraw to his pinnacle and become a prophet, denouncing a generation from whose normal activities he was secluded. When Carlyle expressed his readiness to work somewhere in a public office, no such place was found for him, and for the rest of his life he was left to grind out book after book with a bitter consciousness within him that such was not the most venerable of lives. All the worship that was offered could not sweeten what wiser treatment might have entirely blotted out. Ruskin started from the opposite pole as far as circumstances were concerned, but he too drifted into the same isolation, and he leaves us convinced that of the two, his was the sadder life.
Yet if all the fairies had conspired together at his birth to protect this man of genius and foster him to the utmost, what more could they have done? He had wealth and comfort and opportunity from the very first. While he was still a boy his genius was recognized, and he had only to publish his first book to become one of the most famous men of the day at the age of twenty-four. But the fairies after all did not give him the gifts he wanted. If one had seen Ruskin about the year 1869, according to Professor Norton, “you would tell me that you had never seen so sad a man, never one whose nature seemed to have been so sensitized to pain by the experience of life.” This surpassing gift of eloquence, in the first place, brought him far more of evil than of good. Still, after sixty years or so, the style in which page after page of Modern Painters is written takes our breath away. We find ourselves marvelling at the words, as if all the fountains of the English language had been set playing in the sunlight for our pleasure, but it seems scarcely fitting to ask what meaning they have for us.
